Celebrating the art of beginning.

Monthly Archives: September 2012

If I didn’t have my own teenagers, I’d have to steal some. I offered 17-year-old Christian Hughes a home for life if he would let me share his Homecoming proposal with my four blog followers.

So, yes. This is how Christian invited Nikki to Homecoming at Blue Valley North High School (in a suburb of Kansas City). He put this fresh poultry proposal on her driveway on a hot September day and waited for his smart phone to ping. She said “yes” before salmonella set in.

Like so many creative breakthroughs, this was a simple case of limited resources and a quest for quality. “A good chicken costs less than bad flowers,” Christian says.

I have heard mothers bemoaning the loss of tradition and flowers in the new creative culture of dance invitations.”Something is getting lost,” they say.

I say, “did you see that face on that chicken?”

Sure, we want to defend traditions and preserve practices stARTed long ago. But when we hand our kids our old creations, we can’t be surprised that they want to make them their own. Putting a new face on old traditions gets creative juices flowing and re-starts them without tossing them completely.

Besides, seeing what the youngest minds do with old ideas keeps us one step ahead of our own “sell-by” dates.

When Christian and Nikki ride off into the sunset with seven kids and a KFC franchise, they can tell their Pinterest followers that “It all stARTed with a chicken and a Sharpie.”